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User: ATMAvatar

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  1. Re:You mean they don't do it already? on Will ISPs Be Driven To Spy On Their Customers? · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I don't think anyone believed that many (if any) ISPs were fighting the good fight, as it were. The assumption was more that ISPs are typical businesses, which do not incur costs unless required to do so. Setting up infrastructure and staff to monitor subscriber traffic costs money and effort. Without some well-defined, monetary gain in doing so, ISPs simply won't bother.

    So to answer your title - no, most ISPs probably haven't monitored traffic already, because it was a waste of time and resources to do so.

  2. Re:Good for you. on Ask Slashdot: Old Dogs vs. New Technology? · · Score: 2

    Except the bios tweak was only necessary because they absolutely had to re-image to WinXP. That was the primary failure that snowballed to dicking with BIOS settings. Putting an outdated OS on newer hardware and expecting there to be zero issues is foolish.

    The correct course of action moving forward is to create a standard Win7 image and use that instead. Of course, an even better course of action would have been to get a couple test machines in their target hardware configuration and do testing, then create and test a Win7 image when it became apparent that non-standard BIOS settings were required to use their ancient WinXP image.

  3. Re:Lucky on Ask Slashdot: Old Dogs vs. New Technology? · · Score: 3, Informative

    This is known as the "Dead Sea Effect".

  4. Re:Is it really all piracy? on BitTorrent Usage Increases In Europe, Following the Pirate Bay Blockade · · Score: 1

    Let them try. Any country foolish enough to completely cut themselves off from the Internet at large is going to suffer some pretty serious withdrawal effects, particularly in their economy. Imagine the plight of the poor copyright holders once they've turned every business with an online presence against them.

  5. Re:Earth law vs universal law on Copyrights To Reach Deep Space · · Score: 5, Funny

    Of course. This was a brilliant plan to spur on space innovation in the private sector by encouraging the copyright cartels to sue any alien civilization that dared play the record in public. No matter how many light years away the alien race may be, we can be assured that the copyrights will still be in force by the time voyager reaches them.

  6. Re:First dissent on Supreme Court: Affordable Care Act Is Constitutional · · Score: 2

    Publicly-funded healthcare has no need to initiate price gouging against a captive customer base to placate shareholders with ever-increasing profits.

  7. Re:Breathless summary by the clueless on Texas GOP Educational Platform Opposes Teaching Critical Thinking Skills · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Questioning everything is merely the beginning of the journey of scientific knowledge.

    The point of the process is that every acting theory should have a well-defined set of failure criteria, result data from previous experiments, and steps to reproduce the results should anyone care to challenge the theory. Anyone is free to question the body of results so far, but to be taken seriously at all, he/she must provide a new body of result data which contradicts the theory and steps to reproduce it so others can verify it.

    The problem is that most of the time you see a scientific theory in the news, the GOP stops at the first step - questioning anything that conflicts with their worldview. If global warming or evolution or gravitation or relativity or radioactive decay rates or whatever else have holes, I'm sure at a loss in finding the experimental data from people trying to disprove them. Sure, in some cases, it's a specialized- or trivial- enough spec of the natural world that no one bothers to exert much effort to discount existing theory, but are you suggesting global warming is without challengers?

    I don't think I can go longer than a few months without seeing some new finding that "disproves" global warming, only to be discredited later. The reason public discourse has now shifted to how severe the results of global warming may be is because the (very well-funded) groups trying to disprove global warming have nothing to show for their work, and perhaps they have thrown in the towel.

  8. Re:I for one... on Minnesota Supreme Court Rejects DUI Challenges Based On Buggy Software · · Score: 1

    With the sobriety checkpoints, there isn't even protection from warrant-less searches.

  9. Re:As an American... on EU Commissioner Reveals He Will Ignore Any Rejection of ACTA · · Score: 5, Funny

    Pretty much, no. The information can't be faked. The launch officer is the last guy in the chain that knows his bird's target.

    I would have thought the target would be the last guy in the chain to know the target.

  10. Re:in related news on Biotech Report Says IP Spurs Innovation · · Score: 5, Informative

    The entire premise of the article is that patents == innovation, and thus, more patents indicate more innovation. As an example, the article mentions that:

    Similarly, after Taiwan instituted a rule about IP based on government-funded findings, the Bayh-Dole Act, university patenting increased by 354% between 2004 and 2009.

    Clearly, the increase was due to an acceleration of innovative research and not because of an act that made previously un-patentable research now available for patents.

  11. Security through obscurity can quite easily result in far greater loss. I would much rather have years of research done on dangerous pathogens and risk someone developing a weapon based upon it than have someone develop a dangerous pathogen no one's ever seen before without anyone who's an expert at studying virus propagation and mutation because someone got scared and banned the research.

    In the former case, you already have experts on hand who are intimately familiar with the virus, giving them a leg up on developing a vaccine. Even better - the published research is more likely to provide a subtle nudge towards the same line of pathogens, keeping any would-be bio-terrorists from coming up with anything too terribly exotic. In the latter case, we're left years behind the race towards a vaccine and may not even have any experts available to start the research (as it's been banned). All the ground-breaking knowledge will be locked away behind the closed doors of those with calamitous intent.

  12. Re:O RLY? on Why Bad Jobs (or No Jobs) Happen To Good Workers · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's also the natural end result of un- or under-regulated capitalism. The stable state of any market is a monopoly, where the market either starts as a monopoly or begins as a competitive field where the top competitor either purchases, merges with, or destroys all other competition. When you couple human greed with this system, you inevitably get wage depression at the bottom levels and inflation at the higher levels, as demonstrated quite well here in the US over the last decade.

  13. Re:Like Microsoft Excel? on Bev Harris of Black Box Voting Releases Accenture's Voting Software · · Score: 1

    The failure wasn't so much that he didn't understand the technical limitations - that's not his job. The failure was that he was micromanaging: dictating from on high how to implement a system down to a platform/technology level. Unfortunately, with so many high-profile and successful (in spite of themselves) CEOs in recent history who micromanage(d), we can expect to see even more of this idiocy in the future.

  14. Re:International Students Pay More on Fastest Growing US Export To China: Education · · Score: 1

    There's a pretty easy way to stop the university from doing that: in-state tuitions are usually low because the university is supported by state funding. Make it so they get a fixed amount *per* in-state student. So if in-state tuition is $12K and out-of-state is $30k, the state gives $18K per student, and the university has no incentive to recruit out-of-state.

    In our current political climate, it is still the smarter business decision to go with the out-of-state students. That $30k is guaranteed for a non-resident, where $18k out of $30k for a resident is submitted to the whims of politicians, and recent history does not give much confidence it will still be $18k in the future.

    If, on the other hand, the state is currently giving the university less than that $18k, then the state is using out-of-state students to subsidize cheap tuition for in-state students, and nobody in-state should be complaining that an out-of-state student is paying for your kid's education.

    If the state is giving the university less than $18k, it is the university's responsibility to charge more than $12k in-state tuition to make up the difference. It is not the state's problem if in-state tuition stays at a level below what is required for parity, barring some unthinkable state law capping tuition.

  15. Re:Huh? on Fastest Growing US Export To China: Education · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Sure. Have you any idea of what Chinese ethics consist of? Typically, it's "I got mine, screw you" and "how can I work this situation to my personal advantage?" I'm not saying all Chinese are like this, but it seems pretty common to me in their culture.

    So I see we have already successfully exported US ethics.

  16. Re:for artists? on David Lowery On the Ethics of Music Piracy · · Score: 1

    The Constitution states:

    To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;

    There are several problems with current law, though:

    • Most often, it is neither the artist nor inventor which owns the IP rights to the work.
    • The duration (of Copyright, at least) has been extended to the point that one can hardly call it "limited".
    • In the case of patents, it is easily demonstrated that the rate at which new inventions are created has been exponentially increasing throughout history, and we have undeniably hit a point at which patents are actually obstructing scientific and technological progress.
    • The enforcement of IP laws (particularly Copyright) has gone from a relatively benign civil process to a very draconian criminal process which largely sidesteps other constitutional protections, most notably the 5th and 6th amendments.

    I'm sorry, but IP laws have been incredibly perverted from their initial state, and I have absolutely no sympathy for someone playing the pity card about piracy. Their protections are stronger than ever and their enforcement measures are stronger than ever.

    I also find it highly suspect that the most vocal advocates of IP law - the MPAA and RIAA - are constantly proclaiming the end times are here. Yet, they are doing surprisingly well given the fact that they deal exclusively in luxury items during one of the worst economic downturns since the great depression.

  17. Re:Let the guy fucking rest already... on How Steve Jobs Changed Google Plus · · Score: 1

    Larry is even less likely to innovate.

    No, he'll buy out the guy who patented the use of fire and brimstone and sue the Devil for their use. After all, with all the lawyers down there, you just know patents have been extended ad infinitum.

  18. Re:"no current plans to enforce the law." on Proposed UK Communications Law Could Be Used To Spy On Physical Mail · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Both liberals and conservatives screw the population as a whole. The liberals tend to lie about it and act like they want to do some good, while the conservatives are rather brazen about giving more money to the wealthy, but they both ultimately do the same thing - concentrate power and money into a small elite group.

    In the end, what trickles down to the rest of us isn't green - it's yellow.

  19. Re:Help me out here... on Phil Zimmermann's New Venture Will Offer Strong Privacy By Subscription · · Score: 1

    You can do that using digital signatures already without having to resort to some central authority.

  20. Re:also get rid of unpiad and college only interns on Too Many Biomedical Graduate Students, Not Enough Jobs · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The crux of the issue with allowing unpaid internships that provide nothing of value to the company and paid internships which do is this: prove the intern's work provided value. If a record company or Hollywood studio can bill a blockbuster success as somehow a multi-million dollar loss, you can bet that any company that wants to exploit unpaid interns will easily be able to "prove" that they got nothing of value.

    The distinction between the two works just fine in an environment with mature adults, but the business world is a bunch of two-year-olds screaming "mine!".

  21. That sounds like commie talk. Why wouldn't we want to give all the money in the country to a few elites? They wouldn't be so rich if they weren't better than everyone else, after all. Anyone left poor should have worked harder.

  22. Re:Private security theater is no better than publ on Sen. Rand Paul Introduces TSA Reform Legislation · · Score: 1

    Airports in Isreal has no such security theater (body scanners, taking shoes off, 4 oz restrictions, etc.). How many Israeli flights do you hear about flying into buildings? Being hijacked at all?

  23. Re:"privatization" on Sen. Rand Paul Introduces TSA Reform Legislation · · Score: 1

    How much choice do you anticipate having with airport screeners? Are you expecting an airport to have multiple lines, each going through a different screening company's employees, where you can choose which line to go through? Are you expecting multiple new airports to pop up, each using different screening companies, such that you can pick and choose which airport to use based upon the security theater you will endure?

    The best you can hope for is that the airport has some feedback mechanism where you can complain about the security contractor and hopefully do something about it. I'm not sure that mechanism is much better (if at all) than our current system, as we at least have an illusion now of being able to impact the TSA through our votes. If the airports choos to omit this feedback mechanism (as they likely will - airports don't usually have competition), we'll actually be worse off than we are now.

    The best option is to eliminate the TSA and go back to the old security model (only with locks on cockpit doors). I would still have a far greater chance of dying in a car accident while driving to the airport (several orders of magnitude!) than I have of dying in a terrorist attack.

  24. Re:Crsnk up the FUD to 11. on US Senators Concerned With Surveillance Bill "Loophole" · · Score: 1

    Well... not yet. The facility isn't finished yet.

  25. Re:huh? on Ask Slashdot: Ambitious Yet Ethical Software Jobs? · · Score: 2

    Well, you could do open source work, which could meet all 3, but then you'd probably be leaving out the omitted "Paid" part.